When do you step up to nuclear power?
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Some point down the road. From what I can tell, you have to do something with the waste which add another complication.
You also can’t ever let the input or output sit around because it will irradiate all your shit.
Coal truck route established. That was a lot more work than I imagined. I had to set up a coal-fired power plant at the coal head and bring coal from the three “nodes” there into one spot, which is where I built the power station and loading dock.
It’s now a self-sustaining operation generating more power than it needs from the coal, both for its own power needs, but also for the vehicles, which run on coal and so are refueled every time they load up.
I built the receiving dock back at base, and then rebuilt it in a better location after driving around for a good while only to realize I had boxed myself in at that location. I ran the looooong conveyor lines from where the dock now was to where the coal is needed, adding a storage box to act as a buffer.
Then I had to drive the route, recording it as I went, from one dock to the other and back again. It leaves these little hologram arrows as you go so the return is a lot easier. It also helps to make sure that you do not drive along the same pathway to avoid collisions in case you have more than one truck.
With the route established, I set the truck on autopilot and off it went. I followed it, deleting the pauses in the route (from when I stopped the check the map) and made sure that it went smoothly. Which it did.
I now have more than enough coal coming into my base, and it’s the first self-sustaining system I have created. Now I just have to figure out how to expand my coal-fired power production and get that back to base. But not today…
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The next task assigned to me by my evil corporate overlords is to build 1,000 Versatile Frames. They come off the presses at a snails pace despite requiring a considerable input of resources, which is how this game ups the ante: each new piece requires more and more resources to build.
Here’s my layout to get this job started:
Now, eagle-eyed readers will notice a disconnect for the final assembly of the Versatile Frames; it requires 24 Steel Beams per minute but I’m feeding it only 18. I drove myself mental trying to figure out how to balance the top and bottom halves of the flowchart. Then it struck me: I don’t have to!
The shortfall of Steel Beams will slow down the Assembler and thus reduce the draw on elements from the top half of the chart. This will eventually back-up the system all the way to the Smelters. Once the Smelters start pulling less Iron Ore, the Splitter will feed more down to the Steel Foundries, increasing the production of Steel Beams thus allowing the Versatile Frame Assembler to catch up with the backed-up resources from the top half of the chart.
How this works is that the Popular Front of Judea Splitters divide resources equally across the output lines but, if one of those lines backs up, it just pushes the excess to the other outputs. As I am short 18 units/pm of Iron Ore, one half of my system will backed up while the other can run, or vice versa, so it will yin and yang its way along quite nicely.
The only downside I see to letting the system find its own balance is time. It will take some time for the various lines to get backed up to where the Iron Ore comes in. Notably, the bottom half will “over-produce” initially as it will draw 80 units/pm of Iron Ore from the Splitter array until the back-up starts to form at the Versatile Frame Assembler.
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You’re the victim here.
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Shut it down if you see smoke coming from your computer.
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My computer’s fine. Now, my brain…
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So, as it turns out, I need to produce a metric fuck ton more coal. I have built a 8-burner coal-fired power plant, but I can barely keep 4 burners going with the fuel I am able to deliver.
Fancy frame factory plans on hold until I can secure additional coal supplies. That’s a lot easier said than done.
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OK, I’m stupid. I had created an artificial bottleneck between the coal unloading dock and the power generators. Once I cleared that up, I have 8 burners generating 600MW of power and belching glorious toxic smoke into the virgin atmosphere of whatever rock they dropped me onto.
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At what point of this game do Limey’s workers seize the means of production?
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That sounds like something that should happen, but I’m effectively stranded in this place until I complete the resource-stripping.
I send things up to orbit via a space elevator (I built a space elevator, b-t-dubs) so they won’t pick me up until they’re satisfied I’ve raped the ecosystem sufficiently.
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Even with the coal bottleneck solved, my generators were still not staying online.
Each of the 8 generators requires 45 cubic metres of water, which is 360 cm total. No problem as my water extractors can pull 480 cm total. So what gives?
Well I cheated for space and convenience, and used a single pipe to supply all the generators, and that pipe has a max flow rate of 300 cm. So each generator was fighting all the others for water.
Tomorrow’s problem will be rebuilding the whole fucking thing ground up to make sure each unit is getting the proper feeds, and to clean up the anti-bottleneck spaghetti I made today.
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Obsessed? Moi?
ETA: This is my first go at a logistics floor. I know it looks like the whole thing is floating in mid-air, but there’s a lower deck where the water pipes and coal conveyors run and then pop up into the generators on the backside (NTTAWWT).
This is going to be my model for new builds and rebuilds (of which I see many in my future) going forward. In my current layouts I have worked to get the conveyors off the floor to make it easier to move around the machines, but that’s proto-environmental ravager stuff and I’ve just made fire.
To be honest, this was actually floating at the time I took the photo. The game doesn’t force you to build ground up, so you can use a wall or pillar to gain some vertical separation and then build unsupported at that level. You can just leave it there floating or you can go back and build a purely decorative support structure - which is what I did here (after I took the photo).
So, yes, all those astounding multi-floor buildings that you’ve seen on YT are just a stack of floating floors, covered from wall-to-wall with the machines of heavy industry, with a pretty cladding around the outside to cover up the total lack of structural support.
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It’s stuff like this that has me eyeing retro video game cabinets…
If you’re serious I’ve got a good guy to talk to
Yes/no. I think I want one, but those of us with ADHD are prone to be impulsive…
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Back to Satisfactory, I am still stupid in multiple ways.
I found more coal. You can scan for resources (one type at a time), but the resource in question only shows up on your compass for a few seconds and the only other detail is the distance. With the difficulty traversing this game on the ground, it’s easy to get pushed off course and the resource in questions could always be above you so it has been hard to track down the precise location.
Then I happened to scan by mistake instead of opening the map. When I opened the map straight after, the locations of the scanned resources were plotted directly on there. Fuck me! I had this all along but had no idea. So now it’s easy to scan, open the map, drop a pin and head straight there.
With this new source, I have doubled my coal supply and set up the necessary production hub and truck route. That meant that I could do what I planned to do, which was double my coal-fired power production.
This I did; after stupid thing #2 which was to forget to upgrade the conveyor belt between the loading dock and the generators. I couldn’t work out why the now 16 generators were going on and offline until I figured that I had overlooked a choke point (again). It was feeding only half the necessary coal, but everything came back up and stayed up once I upgraded the belt.
With that done, I dismantled the biomass power production I had in the middle of my layout and I am now on fully sustainable, if very eco-unfriendly, coal power.
Currently, I am producing random items in convoluted layouts at my base. These items are all being pumped into storage boxes, which are scattered randomly too. I think the time has come to make a storage hub so that I can see everything I’m making and be able to pull from storage when parts are needed to make other things.
This is about to get really complicated.
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We were going to point that out but thought it best that you come to your own conclusion.
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Yeah, I am facing a substantial tear down and rebuild. I’m going to need a giant spreadsheet to lay it all out so that I can run production buses of raw materials, manufactured parts and assembled items. Continuing to Frankenstein this thing is just going to make the tear down and rebuild far worse down the road. Now that I don’t have to worry about power for a bit (I have enough coal coming in for at least another 600MW), I’m going to start building a proper, big boy factory.
What I really want are the smart splitters that everyone uses. The dumb ones I have available now just split whatever comes in evenly between the outputs. Smart splitters allow you to dictate what goes where, so you can run a “sushi line” across the backside of a run of storage containers, and the splitter will send only the correct item into the box and pass everything else through.
Also, right now, when one of these boxes is full - which is true of many of the lines banging out simple parts - the lines just stops. A sushi line will pass on any excess and you can run this into a “sink” which disposes of the overflow and gives you tickets towards upgrades. That way your production is always running and you are getting credit for the stuff you’re not using that flows into the “sink”.
ETA: A quick bit of research and it seems I should’ve unlocked Smart Splitters before now. I need to find a gold-like metal called Caterium, which is all I need to get it done. I had found a small pile of the stuff a while back, so I am now able to scan for it (you can only scan for things you have already found by exploration). I will just have to figure out how to get it mined and back to base.
I have also decided that I need to build some roads for my truck routes.
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This all sure seems like work to me. With no tangible reward.
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